Key developments: George Zimmerman was an aggressive bouncer who was fired from his job in 2005 at the age of 21. Trayvon Martin wanted to be an aviation mechanic or engineer. Besides the media really, really wanting to continue pushing the mug shot image of Zimmerman and the cute young boy image of Trayvon Martin – what with their not looking into the positive relationships that Zimmerman had such as his mentorship, along with his wife, of kids in their city – Zimmerman suffers a natural barrier in this media perception game. Which is why the exploration of Martin’s social media is so important: Trayvon Martin’s acquaintances will not be as forthright or condemnatory of Martin as Zimmerman’s past acquaintances would be of Zimmerman. It’s part no-snitch culture and it’s part a difference in the perception of what constitutes “aggressive” or noteworthy behavior. What was aggressive behavior to Zimmerman’s acquaintances – either his friends or his coworkers – is not likely to be considered aggressive by Trayvon Martin’s crew. And if it were, it’s not like they’d tell a reporter anyway. So we’ll never be able to compare apples to apples here.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes something on the topic that deserves response:
But what, precisely, is the relevance of wearing gold grills? What, specifically, is the pertinence of having once given an obscene gesture? Why, exactly, does it matter that Martin’s imagination sometimes ranged into profane thoughts of sex and violence? How does any of this help us understand his killing at the hands of by George Zimmerman?
It seems pretty clear to me, but I doubt that Coates et al will agree. I compare it to the
Broken Windows Theory espoused by the late James Q. Wilson. I believe that his theory of the psychological impact of environment on social behavior and crime can be applied to the individual. I’m struggling to come up with a name to describe it. Once certain infrastructure becomes ungrounded, debilitated, or broken, a new equilibrium is achieved. In a neighborhood, broken windows and dirty streets prime individuals for grime and crime. It becomes the new norm. The same process occurs at the most atomistic level – the individual. One minor break can cascade down into fundamental decay. This is especially true for young men. I’d add that it is even more the case for young
black men who have unique pressures; the culture to which many black men are drawn holds “broken windows” up as some sort of ideal. The actual process of breaking windows – socially or individually – is a laudible act of defiance. Problem is, it primes the pump for more of the same and too often ends in prison or death.
Once a person commits themselves to fighting, stealing, or operating outside of what is deemed “polite” society – they are temporarily lost. Grills and weed and just playing at being hypersexual or violent are the foothills to that mountain. The person – the kid – perhaps will rope off a few years of crude, lewd, criminal, and perhaps violent behavior because, “well, hell” he thinks, “I’m already a bad guy”. When the barrier between nice kid and wayward teen or angry young man is broken, it is damn near impossible to reclaim innocence. It’s like pushing toothpaste back into the tube.
I think of my dad. I think he’d agree with me that he could have justifiably been shot in the name of self-defense, tresspassing, or other petty crimes on many, many occasions. My dad grew up in a Catholic orphanage in England (granted, with its dearth of guns). Being held to strict standards, it was easy for him to see himself as some sort of demon after he’d fallen on the wrong side of morality. So small cracks became bigger. In his mind he was already destined for Hell. Taking a pound from a stranger or pinching some fruit helped reassure him that he was evil, and if he was already evil what would be lost by upping the ante? Small defiance markers – piddly tattoos and
bovver boots and hash and even rock and roll – were part of the transition. Before long my dad was just a bad kid. Or, rather, he was a multifaceted individual that embraced his bad side because it was oh so easy and because it was his social currency.
My dad was Trayvon Martin.
To answer Ta-Nehisi’s question: the importance of all of those markers of defiance are that, if Trayvon Martin were capable of attacking George Zimmerman, those behaviors and expressions would be expected to have happened. It’s a cause-causality issue. The grill doesn’t cause Martin to be violent and capable of attacking Zimmerman, but it indicates a willingness or a capability of doing something like that. Same with Broken Windows – the broken window doesn’t create crime, but it feeds back into a system which becomes complacent or accepting of criminal acts and criminals.
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Good points.
The relevance of things like Martin’s grill, Martin’s favorable attitude towards seeing himself as a “Nigga”, Martin’s aggressive posing for pictures, Martin’s history of potential theft and drug use or drug dealing is that they establish Character.
Knowing all these things about Martin establishes that Martin’s character was such that as individuals assessing the case, we’re able to understand why it might be that the altercation between Martin and Zimmerman occurred.
The media want us to believe a hagiography of St. Martin. But he wasn’t a saint, he was a kid who was en route down a dark path. He didn’t deserve to die, but he was complicit in a series of mistakes that led to him being killed. And knowing his Character allows us to see how that series of mistakes may have played out.
I live in a fairly diverse downtown metro neighborhood. I was out to happy hour with a guy who hires laborers at a mechanical company. This black guy that I am bar acquaintances with came over and said hi, He has gold teeth, tattoos, baggy pants. I introduced him to my friend. He asked if they were hiring. My friend said, ‘no, not at this time.” After the black guy left, my friend said, “we bend over backwards to hire african americans, but can you really think you can dress like that and get hired.”
That is the point– wearing suits and being well dressed signals one thing type of behavior, gold teeth, tats, baggy pants, signals another type of behavior.
Zimmerman has claimed self defense. To assess that, we intuitively assess the plausibility of the victim acting as Zimmerman claimed. The family and its lawyer understood this, so they deliberately created a false impression about Trayvon, false as to age, size, appearance, history and character. If these things were not relevant to most people, the lawyer wouldn’t have bothered trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Obviously, these things aren’t dispositive on the issue, but they make it less likely that people will view Zimmerman’s claim as implausible and therefore reject the other evidence in Zimmerman’s favor.
This whole incident has got me eating skittles non-stop!
Steve Sailer wrote recently (sorry, no link) about the need for elite liberals to think and declaim one kind of thought for the public sphere, while acting on the basis of quite a different set of thoughts in private life. Keeping that up day-in and day-out has to be hard work.
The linked Ta-Nehisi Coates piece exhibits this sort of protective stupidity. He warns us not to gather available information in order to make prudent judgements. To do that could be rrascist. He’d certainly never do so. Really? Even if something personally important was at stake, like his wife’s safety, or his kid’s future? Really?
OK, taking him at his word, we move to irony. Most of Coates’ article is what he says he’s finds so appalling. Taking not-directly-relevant facts and using them to inform his broader judgement. Here, Coates calls out the person who so rracistly raised the subject of Trayvon’s Twitter accounts, Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson:
Hyperbole aside, even though this slice of Carlson’s past has no bearing on the truth, falsity, or relevance of what The Daily Caller or anyone else has found out about Trayvon or about Zimmerman, it turns out that Coates does want to talk about such things, and wants his readers to consider them, too.
Maybe Coates isn’t protectively stupid, after all. Just partisan.
A Google of “Tucker Carlson gay assault” brought me to this page at Media Matters (!). At the bottom of that article, one can read Carlson’s self-serving version of his high-school-age bathroom encounter, and compare it with Coates’ self-serving characterization.
These sorts of character tells do matter. They help me take the measure of Carlson. And Trayvon and Zimmerman.
Coates and Gutman, too.
Great analysis in this post, GLP.
Some kids have a harder time fighting off the peer system that is around them. Of course, the peer system around kids depends on lots of things, race a huge factor. T
If this kid were still with us, if he’d never been involved in this mess, I’d still be sad looking at the juxtaposition of pics of him when he was younger, in what look to be his early junior high school with pics of him now, with gold grill, and esp. reading his social media correspondence.
It’s not true that what he said to his friends is just meaningless teenage male bluster. You can actually trace the metamorphosis from innocence to either “I am a thug” or “Even if I’m not a thug, I want people to think I am” state of mind.
Either state of mind meeting up with George Zimmerman that night was not going to end well.
amac,
good thinking on the hypocrisy displayed by Coates towards Carlson. to jump topics, it’s funny that Carlson had that experience because my dad, who i mention, had a similar experience. it happened in England, and my dad says he basically razored a dude who tried to get after him in a bathroom. i mean, that’s one way to handle it. i can’t say that i wouldn’t do the same thing. i think that mine and yours is actually a more empathic reading of what someone like Trayvon Martin would do if he felt violated in some way by Zimmerman. as i wrote, people do a lot of things for which they could very easily wind up getting shot. i punched a guy for harassing me and my girlfriend for several hours at a bar. i waited so long for fear that he might have a weapon or something but finally had to act. if i’d have ended up getting hurt or killed i think that i wouldn’t be viewed all that sympathetically.
From the beginning Martin lawyer Crump has sought to make the public think of Trayvon as an angelic little kid who was incapable and wholly not disposed to initiate a fight with Zimmerman or able to beat him up and pin him to the ground to do more of it. Hence the pictures when he was 12-13 but not more recent ones of him at 17 that conservative bloggers have had to find. Hence his mother lying that he’s never been in a fight and claiming he was an honor student when he was a middling one at best. Hence the story that he was out to buy skittles and Arizona iced tea which may well have been totally a lie or may have been the lie he told his father when leaving the house – in strong rain – to supposedly go to a 7/11 a mile away according to Half Sigma. Maybe he was casing the neighborhood for easy targets.
Anyway that’s why the fact that he’s a tough looking 6’2 and about 160 pounds instead of looking like a 12 or 13 yo matter. That’s why looking at his tweets revealing his brother and friends talking about having hit someone around Thanksgiving and a bus driver on a week or so before the shooting matter.
It’s not proof that Trayvon hit Zimmerman first and then greatly prevailed in the fight until he was shot, and certainly not that he deserved to die, but all of this does put paid to the impression Martin’s lawyer and complicit media have worked to create that it’s utterly implausible that Trayvon could have. Team Trayvon has certainly worked hard to bring out any acts of violence real or bs to make it seem it’s very plausible that Zimmerman would have started the fight.
Actually there’s no evidence that Zimmerman hit Trayvon at all that I know of.
“But what, precisely, is the relevance of wearing gold grills? What, specifically, is the pertinence of having once given an obscene gesture? Why, exactly, does it matter that Martin’s imagination sometimes ranged into profane thoughts of sex and violence? How does any of this help us understand his killing at the hands of by George Zimmerman?”
The stupidity of these questions is breathtaking.
When I look at pics of innocent, angelic, 12-year-old Trayvon, GZ’s claim of self-defense seems implausible and far-fetched.
Yet when I look at pics of gangsta, thuggish, 17-year-old Trayvon with gold-grill and tattoos, GZ’s claim of self-defense seems credible and reasonable.
Is this not F’ing obvious??
The people on Trayvon’s side are simply not going to listen to this argument. They continue to repeat the mantra “what does that have to do with him getting shot?” Unfortunately nothing will get through at this point, because they refuse to even entertain an honest argument.
One of my favorite rap artists is Biggie Smalls. Of course I’m older and I can listen to his music and enjoy it for what it is, but make no mistake: he sings about what it took for him to make it, how he survived on the streets, how he is a “tru playa” and how he had pile of cash and pile of dope and pile of women at all times. Sure, a lot of it is hyperbole. And granted, he made his name rapping, but he’s not shy about hyping up his thuggery. I can’t think of any other mainstream music that talks openly and even blatantly promotes this type of behavior. But some don’t see the connection whatsoever. Sure, there are plenty of kids who can just listen to rap and take on the style and that’s it. Hell, I listen to it and I’m the furthest thing from thug culture. But that’s not to say that others don;t listen to these guys and consider them role models. Trayvon seems like he was taking things to the next level- possibly selling weed, “handling his bidness” with someone who didn’t pay up, carrying around several pieces of women’s jewelry (possible exchange for weed?). In other words, it seems like he could have been starting down that path, as Chuck Rudd so adeptly described in this “Broken Windows” piece. But again, I’m not saying he was a thug, I’m just allowing for the possibility for the sake of argument.
So here’s a kid who might have been prowling around the neighborhood, or maybe he was just taking a shortcut through the backyards to get back home. Either way, GZ was within his right to ask him what he was doing or where he was going. Now the MSM will say he still didn’t deserve to get shot, as if nothing transpired in between. I guess their point being “so what if the kid was a thug and felt like he was being profiled, so what if he attacked Zimmerman? Does that give Zimmerman the right to shoot him?” Well, yeah it does actually (which is why they let GZ go). We don’t know how it happened of course, but if GZ never laid a hand on the kid and the kid attacked him, then GZ was well within his right to shoot him if he felt he wasn’t able to defend himself. I’ve seen too many videos of guys kicking people in the heads repeatedly after they’ve been knocked out, and you don’t want to be in this position. If someone is on top of you slamming your head on the concrete, game over.
Again, I’m not saying this is how it happened, but the other side won’t even allow for the possibility, and can’t see how one thing can be related to the other. It’s like they are saying “he might have been a thug and he might have attacked someone else unprovoked, and he might have been beating the crap out him, but he didn’t deserve to get shot.”
If you don’t want to get shot, don’t attack people.
This ties in with your post about tattoos some weeks back. That it is an anti-social signal. The way we choose to present ourselves speak to a certain mindset.
Regardless, no one seriously argues otherwise. No one wonders rather the reports of some musclebound, midwestern, tattooed white guy in a wife-beater, suspenders, shaved head and combat boots stomped down some Mexican is plausible, or what his possible motives might have been.
Coates et al are just displaying their partisanship, since no one in their right mind would seriously suggest judging each skinhead individually, but instead would judge them mostly on the kind of mindset it would take to so withdraw from society so totally.
Trayvon Martin cultivated the black equivalent to a Skinhead-look (anti-social, dangerously violent, partisan, et cetera). It certainly speaks to a certain mindset to want to look like a ‘No Limit Nigga’. If Zimmerman said he was sipping a latte at corner of his neighborhood and Martin sucker punched him from behind, the story seems plausible given Martin’s choices in presenting himself to the world. That’s the kind of thing that the people that Martin idolizes advocate and have done.
Here is another one of Obama’s sons, 17 years old, in Florida less than a year ago:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57406265/shawn-tyson-17-gets-life-for-killing-brits/
Zimmerman would have to be an idiot to take any chances with anyone that looks like he could be one of Obama’s children, or Eric Holder’s people.
Truth is right. I had a totally different reaction looking at the younger pictures of Trayvon than I did the older ones. He looks like a good kid in his 12 year old picture with him in a maroon shirt. In this picture he looks like someone I would go out of my way to avoid. He really changed in 5 years.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/03/30/CNN-Soledad-OBrien-Makes-it-About-Race-Again
The CNN Soledad O’Brien special is tonight? Will you cover it? I don’t know if I can bear to watch it? I think I might throw something through the screen.
Soledad’s children are mostly white. She doesn’t have anymore authority on this subject than any other white woman.
Soledad got her job by embracing the Latina, not the white part of her. So far she hasn’t seemed to identify with her bi-racial compatriot, George Zimmerman. Maybe if his name were Jorge Zimmerman she might?
She’s no spring chicken anymore. I might watch just to see how she looks.
Soledad O’brien fronting as black is nauseating. Only by the most extreme application of the one drop rule. She can definitely pass as a by far mostly white slightly meztizo Hispanic. Not lily white probably like many Cuban-Americans, by far most of the first wave as Castro was taking over, but by far mostly. That’s what I always though she was until her recent move to head a CNN show about blacks.
Truth–
Yuup. And succinct. Something I don’t do enough.
Lara–
She looks pretty good still. I watched her absurd news documentary over a group of blacks trying to break into the silicon valley entreprenurial world. They all, about 8 or ten of the or something lived in the same house for a period of months. I mean they got help from some very successful venture capitalist leftists out there but still none of them had a clue, none had even a marginally plausible tech startup idea, and none were real smart and most were rather dumb. I mean it wasn’t remotely close.
The show tried to create the impression that they got more offers of funding than they did. I think one or two might have gotten some utterly specified (I’m sure real small) amount of funding while another two were said to have not received final decisions. I mean the VC’s who appeared to be supporting were obviously just trying to look all liberal good rather than actually impressed.
I was actually amazed by how patectic it was.
Coates very next post “On the age and innocence of Trayvon Martin” is a real doozy. It clearly ridicules a key contention of the post immediately prior as nonsense and Coates is completely oblivious. He really doesn’t see any tension between claiming that the ‘selective’ pictures of the daily caller et al demonstrate racism and rubbishing the idea that you can possibly infer anything about the motives of media orgs from the pictures of Martin that they choose to highlight.
Here’s a pic of an innocent, harmless looking lad…
http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/299/jeffreydahmer01.jpg
No problema…right?
soledad can pass as a “castizo” not mestizo. 75% spaniard = castizo.
I think it basically comes down to the fact that many behaviors, including adherence to social mores, are normally distributed. The left consistently fails to recognize this fact. Liberals think they can draw firm lines between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, shift mean behavior to the right or to the left, and still hold lines. They fool themselves. When behavior obeys probability distributions that can be shifted left or right, the slippery slope isn’t fallacy, but reality.
When I was a little child my mother expected her young children to walk in a single file line behind her at the grocery store to make themselves unobtrusive to other shoppers. We weren’t expected to judge whether or not we were actually obstructing anyone. We were simply expected to stay in line. It was a very simple plan for a parent to apply. As society has become less disciplined, more and more kids aren’t taught to do things like this. After all, some narcissistic Baby Boomers might argue, what’s wrong with kids walking alongside their parents and just moving out of the path of shoppers when they see them? That will instill in children a greater sensitivity about the space of other people. It will actually make them more respectful and conscientious of others in the long run. This is an example of the way in which the left-minded never analyze the costs of their own proposals. The assumption is that human potential is not only unlimited but easily attained. These people assume not only that young children will be able to make these more complex judgments, but that parents will actually invest themselves in teaching their children such behavior. They don’t see that complexity is itself a cost.
So the mean of acceptable behavior has shifted and it’s no surprise to see the increasing number of little ones who run around the aisles of stores like hooligans and parents who are oblivious to their children’s misbehavior. The left-minded may find such behavior as obnoxious as I do, but there is little they can do about it beyond complain in private while telling themselves that their thinking had nothing to do with the shift to barbarism.
@Trouble
According to Al Sharpton Trayvon Martin was eating Skillets.
Hey, GLP, you should really read the comments to that Atlantic article, I’m barely a quarter of the way through and already Tah Coates has banned 2 people for A: mentioning that gay people like to have sex in public restrooms and B: saying that gold grills look ‘ridiculously ugly.’
Coates has a level of hugbox maintenance OCD that liberals only wish they could impose in schools, and this probably explains his utter foolishness in his public statements.
I’m wasn’t a big fan of Piers Morgan before this but I just watched a 20 min (approx) segment of him w/ Toure’ and it’s very enlightening. Toure’ is basically showing his ass on the show- totally unprofessional, biased journalism, saying Morgan can’t understand the case b/c he’s not from the US; it’s so condescending but quite revealing.
It’s great how Piers Morgan basically says “what a bunch of fatuous nonsense.”
Morgan ultimately calls him out for convicting Zimmerman of murder without all of the facts, while Toure’ basically says the same old thing: “you can’t comment on this because you’re not from here”, which sounds a lot like “you can’t comment on this because you’re not black.”
it’s worth checking out the entire segment if you can find it.
“Tah Coates has banned 2 people”
He removed my comments. What a coward.
“it’s worth checking out the entire segment if you can find it.”
I’d rather be kicked repeatedly in the balls, than watch Piers Morgan. However, it is amusing when white liberals try to debate reasonably with irrational blacks.
I read Donny’s post, realized I didn’t know who Toure’ is, looked it up (still don’t really know much), googled his twitter feed and read about ten tweets of nothing but sycophantic “you kicked Morgan’s ass” stuff.
These people don’t want the truth; what they want is excitement. They are behaving the way we kids did in the 10th grade when we had a substitute. Tried anything for some chaos, you know?
Myrmecadon –
> Coates has banned 2 people for A: mentioning that gay people like to have sex in public restrooms
Yeah, what an absurd stereotype. Commenters who promulgate it should be banned, darn it!. You’d never see a celebration of gay public bathroom sex at a prestigious liberal website, that’s for sure. Like, say, two days ago in Salon.com.
That’s the problem, this guy Toure’ is considered a “legitimate” voice in the community, and his appearance will only ad to his “cred” b/c he “stood up” to the “white establishment” regardless of the fact that he came of as a complete tool. This case gets more and more ridiculous by t he second.
Watched that Soledad show, and the Guardian Angels guy Sliwa was even trashing Zimmerman, saying he was stalking Trayvon, that there must have been a ton of young guys in hoodies walking past but he decided to fixate on Trayvon. I thought I was watching the Onion for a second!
Here’s what Coates and other liberal/leftist commentators fail to grasp:
The conservative reaction to this thing is not about race itself. It’s not about guns. It’s not about self-defense. It’s not even about Trayvon Martin or George Zimmeran. It’s about media narratives and, by extension, power moves of the left.
I mean, do Coates and company really believe what they’re asserting? Do they seriously think “the right” has suddenly, wholesale decided to “dishonor” a slain teen simply because he’s a slain black teen? Like, do they genuinely, honestly, truly think the right — hell, even just Tucker Carlson — has a racist motive in this?
Do they honestly not see the backdrop here — that media narratives like this have long been used to leverage power against conservative America? And even if they themselves don’t think such leveraging actually takes place, don’t they at least recognize that this is how conservatives perceive it?
And in recognizing this perception, aren’t they able to say, “Huh, OK, I get it: It’s not that the Daily Caller just suddenly felt like smearing the name of some previously unknown black kid. It’s simply that the Daily Caller is trying to combat what it sees as a familiar unfair political play by the left and its mouthpiece, the media. Even if I personally don’t see it as an unfair political play, even if I don’t think the media is the left’s mouthpiece, I know that’s how they see it.”
I mean, the whole thing gets so damned snake-eating-its-tail: The left spotlights some event for the purpose of Indicting Its Ideological Opponent; the opponent protests; the left spotlights this protest for the purpose of indicting; ad nauseam. It’s easy to see why the advance of leftism seems so inevitable. That chain has no kinks. It is a self-contained logic that allows no penetration.
I don’t know if liberalism is really a “mental disorder,” but I do know it’s truly maddening.
myrmecadon:
i can’t read most Atlantic comment threads. i get pretty frustrated and i’ve been banned from commenting there. i’ve exhausted all of my various existing social profiles and disqus won’t let me through. TNC had warned me a time or two during a conversation about the Cleveland 19 case last year. i wrote something about black culture and got popped shortly thereafter. i was cordial but unrelenting in my belief that “black culture” – the set of values, behaviors, and attitudes that young blacks tend to embrace – is one of the factors at play in obscene cases like that in Cleveland, TX (in case you aren’t familiar with it, 19 black guys had gang sex or gang raped a 12 year old girl).
Thomas D,
Yes, it’s the media we are trying to hold to the fire.
However, I think most liberals are doing the same thing, holding the media’s feet to the fire. It’s not about Trayvon or Zimmerman or the law for them or for us.
They want to make sure the media tells the story the way they want it told and to do so means to ignore the rules of good journalism. They’ve actually allowed the black community to act as if there is no such thing as the rules of evidence (“Just arrest him, NOW– we don’t need no autopsy report; we don’t need nothin’ but that cracker in jail). The media knows they are being watched by their benefactors so they tell the story the way they know elites want it told.
Whenever you talk with someone about blacks and crime, you have to rain down DOJ stats on them. It’s tedious work. You have to remind them of how blacks seek to flee their own neighborhoods. They’ll try telling you that blacks are in jails and in prisons at a higher rate than people of other races because of unfair juries (libs don’t say this, but blacks do), but everyone knows that someone who says that is lying so you have to use the black on black crime stats. That usually shuts them up about that, but it certainly doesn’t persuade them. It’s not about persuasion. It’s about anger. Blacks know their culture is detrimental to child-rearing; they know it’s cruel, and they also know that immigrants come here all the time, face prejudice, yet in a couple of generations or so have successful businesses and college-educated children and they don’t.
Most of them know why. Most of them are perfectly aware of their deficiencies in certain areas as a group although they’d not know it by the term HBD, but the deficiences and negative traits of the group mustn’t be admitted in public, only spoken to those they trust.
@crank
“If these things were not relevant to most people, the lawyer wouldn’t have bothered trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”
exactly. the family — and others — lied about why he was suspended. no one in the media has called them out on that. it is very clear and obvious that they were all trying to paint a portrait of a sweet and innocent trayvon. half sigma even made a good point — or one of his commenters did — about how we don’t even know where the skittles and ice tea factoid came from.
did TM really go out to get skittles and iced tea, or was he exploring a new environment, looking for a nice place to break into?
the worst — or best — trick, though, was showing us a picture of a ten year old trayvon. 10 or 12 or whatever, the kid in the pic is pre pubescent. he is a child.
17 is not a child. not even close.
no limit nigga was a black thug, probably a black drug dealer, definitely a black thief. i am the softest, most compassionate bleeding heart liberal you will ever find, but that dude was going to end up in jail or end up dead no matter what.
all those black thugs like to “keep it real”, and just like in the chapelle skit, keeping it real usually ends up being a mistake.
in a way, though, it’s sad. trayvon clearly was a bit better than your normal thug. he had a father, even though his father lived far away. and it sounds like his father was pissed at him for getting suspended, so brought him up to live with him and his fiancee.
maybe i saw boys in the hood too many times, but maybe TM would have ended up okay.
who knows.
If Ta-Nehisi Coates is deleting any comments he doesn’t like, then he is more like a woman than a man. I don’t even bother commenting on most female run sites, because too many of my comments were getting deleted.
Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t have that masculine charisma that Steve Sailer wrote about. I guess it’s good he’s fairly smart. He can at least be a beta provider.
Ok who watched the Soledad O’Brian race fest on the Trayvon Martin “murder” last night?? I didn’t. Out with my girl.
Reports needed!! (Looking at you Lara.)
ThomasD (03/30/2012 at 10:24 pm)
> …I mean, do Coates and company really believe what they’re asserting?
If you’ll indulge me, here is Emmanuel Goldstein discussing the Newspeak term “crimestop”:
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
This practice played an outsized role in analysis of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax/Frame, a few years ago. Especially in most accounts proffered by the mainstream media, and by progressive commenters. There as here, rracism was key — agree with us, or you’re a rracist.
(This is also an important mode of discourse in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming discussions, an area having nothing to do with rrace. You can Google my pseudonym and ‘Paleoclimate’ for a small piece of that story.)
It would be nice if the blanket accusation of rracism started to sound old-fashioned, as has happened with earlier catch-phrases of the Left, and the far Right. “So, that’s your response to the evidence at hand? How quaint!”
But some other meme will be promoted in its stead, I’m sure.
I didn’t watch it. Maybe it’s on YouTube. I’m not sure how much a female really has to add to this conversation. I’m pretty sure Soledad never has been in a street fight or been targeted by a neighborhood watchman. That’s why I appreciate the commentary on here, there seems to be a little more real life experience.
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